Jacque Fresco – Founder
Jacque Fresco’s professional background includes work as a designer in the aerospace industry, human factors engineering, industrial design, and architectural design. His other occupations have included research engineer, technical illustration instructor, technical design consultant, psychological consultant, science educator, inventor, futurist, filmmaker, and author.
Fresco’s interdisciplinary training has led to countless innovations ranging from small biomedical instruments to massive total city systems. His integration of science, art, philosophy, and social engineering has constituted a consilient vision for planetary planning that he called a Global Resource Based Economy.
Across his lifetime, Fresco communicated his vision through five books, seven self-produced films, and innumerable presentations to civic groups, film festivals, conferences, and universities across the United States and in over 25 countries worldwide. Many of these presentations are preserved in thousands of hours of recorded media. His work has been featured in over 1,000 publications and 20 widely acclaimed films.
Fresco’s presentations reflect a serious attempt to both illuminate the causes of social problems and to outline a wide variety of constructive alternatives. His particular lecture technique enables uninformed audiences to grasp the significance of complex social and technical issues through his use of analogy, example, anecdote, and visual illustration in an informal style.
In 1971, Fresco founded Sociocyberneeing, a not-for-profit organization, and in 1995 co-founded the culmination of his lifework, The Venus Project. Starting in 1980, together with his associate Roxanne Meadows, they constructed ten buildings based on his designs, establishing a twenty-one acre center in Venus, Florida. Here they produced videos, books, models, renderings, blueprints and much more depicting Fresco’s designs of future possibilities.
Prior to Fresco’s death on May 18th, 2017, the United Nations acknowledged his contributions by bestowing an award to him for Sustainable City Design and Community. For more about Fresco’s background, visit his resume.
Roxanne Meadows – Co-Founder
Roxanne Meadows worked with futurist Jacque Fresco for 41 years to develop and promote The Venus Project. The function of this project is to develop and implement alternative solutions to the many problems that confront the world today. She participated in many ways, from organizing and designing books, producing and editing eight documentaries, co-writing articles, co-designing the interior, and doing a large part of the construction of the 10 buildings of The Venus Project’s 21-acre Center in Florida.
She prepared blueprints, models, and renderings for various city designs and other proposals presented by The Venus Project. This work has appeared internationally in numerous newspapers, magazines, and journals, as well as many books, websites, and blogs. Ms. Meadows and her work on The Venus Project have also been featured in radio, television, documentaries, and film festivals. She has been interviewed or featured in Futurism.com, Bloomberg, New York Times, Huffington Post, Houston Chronicle, Miami Herald, Philadelphia Tribune, The Times of India, Herald de Paris, Horizon, BBC Two, Now this Future, GQ Italy and much more.
Ms. Meadows, along with Mr. Fresco, has presented the aims of The Venus Project at conferences and seminars throughout the United States and in over 27 countries around the world. She also presented Mr. Fresco to the United Nations in the reception of his award for Sustainable City Design and Community.
Ms. Meadows attended Moore College of Art and received her B.F.A. from the Maryland Institute of Art. She became a professional portrait artist utilizing many different types of media. She later studied design, technical and architectural rendering, and model making under Jacque Fresco for 6 years.
Starting in 1985, Ms. Meadows supplied architectural renderings, models, and design work to major developers and architects throughout the U.S. She was the founder and president of Architectural Arts Inc., which continued this service from 1997 to 2008. A few of her numerous clients include: Disney Development Corp., Trump Towers Tampa, The Lutgert Companies, Westinghouse Communities, Santiesteban & Associates Architects, and Lennar Homes. This work provided a major source of funding for The Venus Project.
Ms. Meadows is well known for her accomplishments in scientific, technical, medical, and architectural illustration and model making. She taught technical and fine arts, and worked as a computer animator for Ken Sneeden and Associates. In pursuit of other interests, she is also a licensed private pilot.
For more information on Roxanne’s background, visit her resume.
Nathanael Dinwiddie
Nate encountered the work of Jacque Fresco at an early age. An enduring fascination with Fresco’s biography and body of work, Nate, as a documentarian, interviewed over 30 associates of historical and contemporary significance to Fresco’s life and to The Venus Project. This research gave extensive insight that preserves institutional continuity and memory.
Nate collected and digitized Fresco’s body of work to preserve and access Jacque Fresco’s 80 years of research and design. The archive includes audio and video recordings, photographic material, visual renderings, technical illustrations, publicity documents, personal papers, physical models, and data media. Nate further organized a transcription project to transcribe the hundreds of hours of Jacque Fresco’s lectures.
Nate spent two years studying transmedia storytelling in preparation to convey, through fictional scenarios, the vision of The Venus Project to the public. Elsewhere, Nate has contributed to publicity articles, film productions, museum exhibits, public presentations, and other roles within the organization.
The central focus of Nate’s work is to perfect the means and ends of a generalist orientation. This includes accounting for the strategies, tactics, logistics, and operational methods and processes of multiple paradigms and integrating them into a broader pattern. Art, Religion, Humanities, Philosophy, Science, Engineering, Business, Industry, Academia, Government, Military all exhibit reactions to different aspects of reality. Integrating the wisdom of all disciplines and paradigms constitutes the key task of an effective and consilient generalist.
Nate relies on his philosophy background to undertake his current work for The Venus Project which factors:
- the optimal learning process to achieve efficient and effective generalist knowledge
- modeling the constituent elements of fundamental skills and their optimal process
- the translation of theory into practice that coincides with ideals
- the lifecycle of competence and expertise
- systematic typologies of disciplines and paradigms of knowledge
- a complete classification scheme of all domains of science
- narrative that is a marriage between art and science to teach about the real world and potential future
- organizations that function as adaptable and evolvable cybernetic governance system
- competently evolving a culture and habitat for humans that is perennially appropriate to Earth carrying capacity and also enabling the fullest potential of the human species to serve a higher purpose
- the pitfalls of change-making and the ‘process’ by which cultures can evolve toward better practices. This work includes synthesizing models that operationalize the mechanisms of better practices and integrate methods into ontologies and typologies that function as a basis for managing The Venus Project’s context.
- a strategic and pragmatic theory of change to evolve The Venus Project’s work
- the process of thought and action that enables seamless flow with nature
- discovering, instead of inventing, the sacred
Nate received separate degrees in Film/Media Studies and Philosophy, and studied Applied Behavior Analysis as an extended education at the University of Kansas.
Contact: nate@thevenusproject.com
Theofilos Chaldezos
As a child at the tail end of apartheid South Africa, Theofilos witnessed grave injustice, sparking a quest for solutions. A video from The Zeitgeist Movement led him to Jacque Fresco’s visionary ideas. This introduction evolved into a deep immersion in Fresco’s teachings and exploration beyond conventional boundaries, marking a transformative journey toward innovative solutions.
The pivotal moment came in 2013, as Theo stepped onto the grounds of The Venus Project’s center in Venus, Florida. Here, he connected with the essence of the project and began his learning through The Mentor Program (a course that The Venus Project offered). Theo’s passion for learning and sharing knowledge took center stage. When the original mentor departed, Theo was allowed to transform the course into the dynamic Sociocyberneering Education.
However, Theo’s story does not stop there. His background in aviation and education provides a distinctive perspective on the human factor, information processing, collaboration, and workload management. Seated on the Board of Directors of The Venus Project, Theo seamlessly aligns his aviation-honed skills with self-taught expertise such as systems thinking, human behavior, and general semantics with The Venus Project’s aims and proposals. His journey reflects adaptability and an unwavering dedication to pursuing systems of thought that will bring about a better world.
Beyond his role on the Board of Directors and involvement in education, Theo has supplemented our platform by crafting insightful explainer articles, contributing to recent FAQs, and sharing opinion pieces on our official YouTube channel. Additionally, he has extended the reach of Fresconean thinking by featuring several articles in the Immortalists Magazine, fostering engagement with diverse communities.Theofilos is currently a Boeing 777 Airline Captain and a Type Rating Instructor. For more information, see: LinkedIn
